p2pnet.net News View:- P2PCore is Jeremy Lucier’s latest venture, launched a month or so ago as the main news site for some of his upcoming projects.

He’s the main programmer for, and also owns, P2PForums and before that, was the lead programmer for File Spree, a small UDP-based file sharing application which used a protocol which was, “faster/equivalent to Piolet, and secure”.

“I launched P2PCore because I finally got fed up with the generic portal site for most file sharing sites (Zeropaid, Slyck, etc),” Lucier told p2pnet.

“They’re all the same. So, I took that and basically said, ‘Well….wouldn’t it be nice to have a centralized place to find programs, torrent sites, news, etc?’. So, I spent a few weeks coding up the site, and now it’s live. It’s been under continual improvements and such since it was released, and will most likely be that way for awhile.”

When’s it due to be finished?

“Once you start a project, it’s never over ”

One of Lucier’s first posts centres on the RIAA’s dismal efforts to use Napster II to turn Emory University into yet another Big Music marketing, PR and sales operation like Penn State.

Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The RIAA: More Bark than Bite
By tm – P2PCore

Demonstrating once again that much of the music industry’s threats against p2p users are often more bark than bite, Emory University announced that eight of the nine lawsuits filed by the Recording Industry Association of America against file-sharing Emory students have been dismissed. Although the reasons for the lawsuit dismissals are still unknown, the fact that such a large percentage of the lawsuits against students in this institution were unsuccessful takes much of the wind out of the RIAA’s over-hyped boasts that file sharers named in these suits don’t stand much of a chance.

Of the approximately ten thousand lawsuits that the RIAA has filed since June 2003 against US file sharers – nearly all against Kazaa/FastTrack users who enabled browsing of their shared file lists – only a very small percentage of these suits has ever resulted in any kind of ’settlement’. Many of these announced lawsuits get dropped for a variety of reasons, perhaps the most common being that the internet service provider no longer has IP logs available dating back to the time of the alleged violation, so the actual p2p user remains forever unknown.

The RIAA is more than willing to issue press releases on a regular basis proudly announcing the number of p2p users who have been targeted in each round of lawsuits. However, they conveniently choose to keep mum about many relevant details – such as the number of failed lawsuits – that might not exactly be “on-message” and project the image that the RIAA seeks to maintain: namely to scare the wits out of all the many millions of p2p users, all but a tiny handful of whom will likely never have to pay out even a dime for using p2p.

Since losing the Verizon decision, the RIAA has been forced to file “John Doe” lawsuits against the IP address of each unknown file sharer, rather than having the ISP provide them the identity of the suspected file sharer prior to filing suit. As a result of relying on each user’s IP log records – which all ISPs will eventually destroy when they overwrite – to reveal a user’s identity, it is not uncommon for the ISP’s log to come up empty, resulting in a dropped lawsuit, thereby letting that particular person off the hook.

The total number of these dropped lawsuits is anyone’s guess; the RIAA isn’t talking.

Because the RIAA has scattered its lawsuits in districts throughout the USA, any independent party would have a very difficult time trying to keep track of the outcome of many of these suits. Out of every batch of lawsuits, most individual cases seem to quietly drop off the radar screen and are never mentioned again. This is, of course, the primary problem in situations in which our news on an issue is dependent on press releases of only one side of the conflict – the news can easily be shaped – if not outright manipulated – by the RIAA’s careful selection of which details to report and which details to bury.

The RIAA announced that they were filing lawsuits against hundreds of Internet2 users, primarily students in universities across the country who have access to this high-speed collegiate network.

“…known as Internet2, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), on behalf of the major record companies, will file tomorrow copyright infringement lawsuits against 405 students at 18 different colleges across the country.”

Within a day of the announcement, the RIAA backtracked on their threat. RIAA president Cary Sherman stated in an online chat:

“Chances are we will not take further action against these particular infringements, but we’re reserving the right to do so. In any event, we will certainly take action against future infringements”

Without the benefit of a script in hand, it seems that Cary Sherman let slip an important detail that his organization would normally rather not reveal: the RIAA’s mass-lawsuit campaign is largely an overblown intimidation tactic designed to scare p2p users with their press-grabbing announcements of huge numbers of lawsuits, but in reality, the majority of these lawsuits might likely never result in any kind of expensive payout.

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Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet.net

See:-
Napster II – Napster II, iTunes at Emory U?, p2pnet, February 18, 2005
Emory University – Crapster at Emory University, p2pnet, December 14, 2004
Penn State – University p2p ‘report’, p2pnet, August 25, 2004

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 15th, 2005 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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